Rogue Lion Safaris
Simon Barnes
A funny, romantic, evocative novel set against the safari tourism business in East Africa, written by an award-winning journalist.After the death of his beloved, bankrupt gambler of a father, Dan Lynch follows his university degree in zoology to a run-down safari camp, where he can work as a trainee guide and, most important, be near George Sorensen, the owner. George is a wildlife genius, but no great businessman, and the camp is threatened by lack of visitors, competition from the much more luxurious set-up across the valley, and corrupt local politicians. In learning about the majestic landscape and fauna of Africa, Dan learns a lot about people – and about himself.A beautiful evocation of place, a warmly observant love story, a suspenseful battle against the odds, Rogue Lion Safaris marks the debut of a very bright new voice in fiction.
Simon Barnes
ROGUE LION SAFARIS
Dedication (#ulink_878212a6-d7d8-5d3e-aa12-d6977063bef1)
For Bob, Jess and Manny with grateful thanks; for CLW with eternal gratitude.
It is customary on these occasions to make some kind of disclaimer: I would like to begin by doing the opposite. The geography and ecology of Mchindeni National Park is based on a real park Somewhere In Africa; every observation of wildlife and every interaction between wildlife and people come from my own notebooks. The single exception is based meticulously on a personally communicated eye-witness report. However, the politics and the administration of the park are entirely fictional, as are all the human characters to be found there. I would also like to acknowledge the most frequently used reference material: The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations by George B. Schaller, Portraits in the Wild by Cynthia Moss, Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa by Gordon Lindsay Maclean and the bird-sound recordings of Baron Robert Stjernstedt.
Contents
Cover (#uab5aab79-98c2-5824-ba7f-57bcb2b927a5)
Title Page (#ud51fa0d7-0e9a-5acb-b146-b683b8de8a4e)
Dedication (#ulink_ef96b1c4-d6eb-5af1-8fd1-35c85b1f5be6)
I: South
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b633dec8-065f-5311-bb84-622d0f054dfb)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_4ee71939-0507-50d8-9a4b-8503ac7df887)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_338e417a-f124-5150-af8b-01342fa2a2f0)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_592cfe27-655c-5047-a46c-e5906c4b1df4)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b9b34b05-20ca-5466-a28f-7fa76894c5a9)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
II: North
III: South
Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I (#ulink_153eda1a-f365-5b21-9cd7-0c97ca940efd)
1 (#ulink_09b08c80-8de3-5c15-a3fb-801b23b7e15d)
George Sorensen, ectomorphic, myopic, leotropic, pointed to the crown of an umbrella thorn, where three vultures sat waiting.
‘Lion?’ he asked, but with George, questions were often really statements. Lion: for sure: and I knew George would want to move in. Dread and delight, familiar fellows, gripped me again.
George pointed a courteous finger skyward, and said to Helen: ‘Striped kingfisher. A duet. Remember what we said about pair-bonding? Hear them? All right, we’ll move in, shall we?’
I heard at his word the razor-stropping duettists, male and female, at their hundred-times-a-day ritual of conquest and sex, and looked to the umbrella thorn. Three white-backed vultures: in a second thorn tree a little beyond, two more vultures, these white-headed. It was likely, then, that something lay dead beneath: and likely that lion had killed it. The vultures had not descended to the cadaver because the lion were still there. Very likely. Say, two to one on.
Well, naturally, lion had killed, and naturally, George wanted to move in. Between us and the thorn trees lay a smallish expanse of grass, parched and painted pale tawny by drought: lion-coloured.
George was seldom aware of people when lion were present, so, as was my habit, I checked the company, a short job, for we had but one client with us. Helen was a rather stately Englishwoman the far side of sixty, with tea-party manners. Vague, frail-looking and ladylike, she had done far better than I had expected when I (arriving rather more than forty minutes late, unfortunately) had met her at the airport five days ago. She had walked not swiftly but tirelessly, and she had taken great delight in the wilderness we had shown her. A client who falls in love with the bush warms a safari guide’s heart. With perfect politeness, she had denied any feeling of disappointment in our failure to find lion for her. Now, on the morning of her departure, we seemed no more than a couple of hundred yards from invisible and uncountable lion. And on foot, of course. But Helen didn’t look like a panicker.
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Phineas?’
Phineas, long and lean, with impossibly graceful fingers, was holding his rifle by the extreme end of the barrel and resting the weapon’s point of balance on his shoulder. This was not a suitable position for immediate action, but then I had never seen Phineas use his rifle as anything other than a leaning post and undergrowth-basher. He turned to me and offered a kind of facial shrug, a brief thrusting out of his lower lip. He stooped, picked up a handful of dust and let it trickle through his elegant fingers. A little cloud hung in the air and drifted towards us. Phineas nodded.
In the far distance, I heard the triple scream of fish eagle. Phineas motioned us to follow with a small movement of his head. We were at it again. Why not?
Well, as a matter of fact, The Safari Guide Training Manual provided a long list of reasons why not. The book was adamant on the point: with lion, there is no such thing as a safe distance on foot. Its author concluded reluctantly that feeding lion could be approached within two hundred yards, but then only if the wind was blowing from them to you, and the country was open and undergrowth-free, and every lion could be counted and accounted for.
The Manual had been produced by the Ministry of National Parks and Tourism, and it was a masterpiece of terror. Its persistent but never stated theme was the dread of the bad publicity that would follow the devouring of tourists by lion, or the impaling of tourists by elephant, or the bisection of tourists by hippopotamus, or the flattening of tourists by buffalo, or the vivisection of tourists by hyena.
None of us followed the Guide’s instructions to the letter, even though infraction of its code could mean the withdrawal of the Safari Guide licence. A certain amount of rule-bending was de rigueur for those who wished to be Cool in the Bush. We all liked to swap tales of our daring when we met up, at the airport or at the Mukango Bar. But no one thought George was Cool in the Bush. Most people thought he was a suicidal maniac. But then George had no aspirations towards coolness. He did not see lion as a virility test. He just liked them. He couldn’t get enough of them, couldn’t know enough. And he could never get close enough. He wasn’t in the least brave: but he was recklessly, perhaps, I sometimes thought, terminally, curious. Some people had tried to tell me that George was addicted to danger, but I knew better than that. I had worked with him long enough to see what the Cool-in-the-Bush brigade missed. George could not possibly be addicted to danger, because he was never aware of whether he was in a dangerous situation or not. It was an alien concept to him. No, it was not danger he was addicted to. It was lion.
So, for that matter, was I. George had shown me the way, so perhaps I was addicted to George too. Or perhaps just to the bush.
George once described the correct method of approaching lion as ‘cosmic courtesy’. Accordingly, we did not walk straight towards the umbrella thorn, and we did not walk away from it. We struck a line of about forty-five degrees. The path took us by a large brake of bush: once clear of it, they were revealed. Lion. A sand-coloured knot, 150 yards away, around an equivocal black shape. Ahead of me, I heard Helen give a brief gasp. As for me, I felt a warm clutch at the belly: the Darlin’ Girl Syndrome, I sometimes called this sensation, naming it for a horse that had once filled me with the same mixture of fear and delight.
And George walked on, neither creeping nor hurrying. Neither fear nor love was discernible: only his eternal curiosity. I watched the lion with the usual rapt anxiety. They were aware of us, but intent on their meal: all save one. She raised her yellow eyes from the carcass before her and with them followed our progress. And we walked on. And on. At length, we halted by a small bush, one that did not conceal us at all. It was another aspect of cosmic courtesy. We were not so bold as to approach openly, nor so timorous as to lurk behind cover. We were neither good nor bad, neither prey nor predator.
A walk through drought-dried grass fills your ears with the noise of your own passage. In the sudden silence of stopping, the sounds of the lions’ banquet came towards us. They were devouring a buffalo, a colossal and absorbing task. In the clarity of the morning, I could hear the slicing of the carnassial shear.
‘Buffalo,’ said George, to Helen and also to a small tape recorder, plucked from the bulging pocket of his khaki shirt. ‘Male.’
‘Definite male,’ I said, an ancient joke.
‘Clearly old, and presumably one of the group of five old males seen near the Tondo confluence yesterday. Remember to check the area this afternoon, try and find the same group, see if it has been reduced to four.’
‘Do you think these are the lion we heard last night during supper?’ Helen asked.
George shifted his specs to the extreme end of his nose, giving himself an air of prim stupidity. There was a new cigarette burn in his shirt, I noticed, just above the left pocket. There were moments when, even to me, George looked like a dangerous lunatic, one quite incapable of comprehending his own interests. It was hard to remember that he was a businessman: hard for him too, I suspected. ‘Well, yes, certainly, or at any rate probably, because it was rather a good chorus last night, wasn’t it? Not a full pride chorus of course, but I counted half a dozen individuals, I think, and we are now in the core area of their territory, around the Tondo confluence, this being the Tondo Pride, of course, territory insofar as lion have a territory, which they do, of course, but rule one of lion is that you must never make rules about lion, because lion certainly won’t stick to them.’
George paused for a moment, perhaps contemplating the inevitability of leonine lawlessness. ‘Where was I? Oh yes, well, they probably didn’t kill last night, there’s rather a lot of buff left, and they are all tucking in, no one lying around digesting and waiting for second helpings. I suspect they killed at first light, and it is a little unusual that the vultures should be here so early. Check the thermometer when I get back to camp, maybe it’s warmer than it’s been so far this season, thermals available for the vultures earlier than previously.’ This last to the tape recorder. ‘But I could get a better idea if I moved around a little, and saw how much of the buffalo is left –’ George took a step forward, and Phineas stretched out a long arm and placed a hand mildly and briefly on George’s shoulder. It looked like nothing more than a gesture of affection. ‘Oh, Phineas, really, I was only going to – oh! Auntie Joyce!’
I heard Phineas’s voice, soft and delighted. ‘Ohhh. She is crazy, that one.’ For one of the lionesses, no doubt sensing a momentary lack of cosmic courtesy in George’s attempted advance, had, in a sudden instant of action, rolled to her feet. To receive the stare of an irritated lion is rather like being struck in the chest by a death ray. Enormous, unreadable yellow eyes, tiny dots of pupils in the ferocious morning light. One lion after another followed her lead, not standing, but raising a head from the carcass to stare at us: four cosmically discourteous intruders.
It was a near-certain fact that if we turned and ran at this moment of tension, the lion would pursue us. In the bush, nothing inspires pursuit so much as flight. But Phineas remained still, leaning on his gun, smiling very faintly to himself. He liked his animals fierce. George too was still, muttering quietly to his machine, recording details of position around the kill. I was also still, from long habit. Relish of the scene fed on its distant but distinct peril. I felt a slow smile crawl up my face: I wanted no other life than this. What if it should end? But I thrust the thought aside. And then, abruptly, Auntie Joyce sat down on her haunches, front paws together, like a domestic cat. She continued to watch: she was no longer considering immediate action. Stand-off.
Auntie Joyce, George said, was the oldest lioness in the pride ‘and probably the pride’s leader, insofar as lion have a leader, which they don’t of course’. She was easily the most crotchety. Lion on a kill are disposed to be peaceful and preoccupied, but Auntie Joyce didn’t go by the rules any more than did George. At the moment of stand-off, I moved half a pace sideways: I wanted to see how Helen was taking all this. No sign of panic. Quite the reverse. I wondered then how many people – how many men – had seen that expression on her face. Eyes wide, mouth slack, quite motionless. She was enraptured: ravished by the eyes of Auntie Joyce. Terror and beauty, or terrible beauty, had undone her. And all the while the lion but forty yards away.
We stood for a further fifteen minutes in flesh-ripping silence, while Auntie Joyce stared unwinking. At last, and slowly, she lowered her body to the ground and lay on her chest, her eyes never leaving us. We remained still. And then, almost reluctantly, she lowered her head and began once again to feed. Silently I released a long sigh. George did not. He had not for an instant ceased to alternate long stares at the lion and muttered comments to his tape recorder. I sometimes wondered what people would conclude if our party were ever devoured by lion, leaving nothing behind but bones, Phineas’s unready, inedible weapon and George’s tape recorder, like the little black box of an aeroplane disaster. Our finders would have every detail of the positions the lions took up relative to each other, how long each fed, where each one rested, who rested alone and who sought company. George could recognise every individual in the pride from scars and nicks, from size and age, from the individual freckling of whisker spots. So could I, for that matter, though rather less certainly. George loved information: he was a scientist long before he became a safari guide, and he believed devoutly that God dwelled in the details. I was never wholly convinced that George transcribed all those tape-recorded notes. Certainly, the tapes themselves were endlessly re-used and re-recorded, stratum upon stratum of leonine detail: a Grand Canyon with endless layers of lion. George’s mind was rather like that.
Phineas caught my eye and made a little gesture: let’s move in still closer. I grinned back at him. The previous night, we had had a silly conversation about who was the more terrified by George’s way with lion. ‘That time we had to climb the tree, Dan, we were stuck up the tree for half a day.’ ‘Phineas, you don’t want the story of the definite male again, do you? That was worse than anything you’ve told me about.’
But George was now counting vultures; he had seen two lappet-faced vultures on the far side of the umbrella thorn, and was asking his tape recorder why no hooded vultures had shown up. I looked at him, made a head gesture: we withdraw? ‘Oh, well, all right, I suppose so. Helen, are you all right? Do you want to move in a little closer and take a photograph? Oh no, you don’t have a camera, do you? Happy? Don’t want a closer look? Very well then. All right. Phineas?’
‘Lead us out, Dan,’ Phineas said quietly.
I did so: forty-five degrees, cosmic courtesy, Phineas between us and the lion, rifle uselessly across his shoulders. Auntie Joyce watched every step of our crackling retreat.
About five minutes later, Helen had shifted from enraptured silence to compulsive talking. ‘Why did you call that lioness Auntie Joyce?’ she asked.
‘Perhaps you’d better answer that one, George,’ I said. I couldn’t bring myself to speak of the human Joyce: a female of infinitely worse temper, our sworn enemy in all her dealings.
‘Oh, well, really, just a joke, really; we called her after the lady who met you at Chipembere, off the plane from England, the lady who looks after our interests in Chip. Silly joke.’
Helen let it pass. Delight had filled her: and it filled me too, in the delight of showing. ‘The most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, how can I ever thank you? So wonderful, so marvellous, and all the time I felt so safe with you and Phineas and everyone.’ Helen, in neatly pressed khaki slacks, a shirt buttoned at the wrists for fear of the sun, and a straw hat suitable for the sport of bowls, was in a frenzy of leonine love.
‘Safe?’ I said, smiling at her pleasure. ‘I never do.’
‘Oh, you’re just teasing.’
‘I am not. George has taken me closer to lion than any sane person would consider safe.’
‘Definite male,’ George said, rummaging around obscenely in the pockets of his shorts until he came up with a box of matches. He lit the cigarette he had just, with great concentration, rolled; a small shower of burning shards fell to earth. ‘Collared barbet,’ he said smokefully, vaguely brushing at the front of his shirt. He expected no reply to this observation.
The country was open as we returned to Lion Camp, and the discipline of the walk broke down. We moved in a line abreast, instead of the Manual’s strictly ordered single file. ‘But surely the lion are fairly safe here,’ Helen said. ‘I remember when we went for a drink at Mukango Lodge, one of the guests was telling me how docile the lions in this park were.’
‘Pretty docile,’ I said. ‘They only killed three people in the wet season this year.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes,’ George said. ‘One schoolboy, poor little sod, one jealous lover, and one old pisscart – oh, I do beg your pardon, Helen.’
Helen waved the apology aside. ‘Jealous lover?’
‘Chap from one of the villages,’ I said. ‘Apparently he thought his girl was dallying with another man. He wanted to catch the pair of them at it, and so he stayed up all night to spy on her. Lion took him while he was sneaking about.’
‘Found bits of him all over the village next morning,’ George continued callously. ‘Lion buggered off before dawn, I’d say, and the village dogs had a tuck-in before the village woke up. Terrible to-do. Lion prints all over the shop.’
‘Was it the same lion every time?’
‘They thought so. There was a lot of talk about the Rogue Lion at the time. Lot of jokes at the start of the season.’
‘It was the same,’ Phineas said. ‘I was with the party of scouts that went to track him. The warden, Mr Mvuu, he said to shoot him before he eat a tourist. But this lion, he is a very clever fellow. One day he kill the schoolboy, next day gone. We tracked him, but always he is ahead. As if he knows we are tracking him. North, always north. We travelled north until we lost him. We tracked him into the North Park, long long way, very beautiful trip, we make camp in a very special place, many many lion there. And that is where we lost him. Too many lion tracks, and he got lost amongst them.’
‘It was a male then?’ Helen asked.
‘Oh yes. Big tracks, big fellow.’
Helen laughed suddenly. ‘Is that why it says Rogue Lion Safaris on your Land Cruiser?’
‘Oh dear. Does it still show?’ George asked, dropping his cigarette butt to the ground and leaving it to smoulder.
‘Of course it bloody shows,’ I said, automatically treading out the cigarette.
‘But I painted over it,’ George said peevishly.
This demonstrated very clearly George’s selective vision of reality, no doubt an essential adaptation for his survival. ‘Your paint job makes it more obvious, not less.’
‘Oh dear. Do you think another layer will do the trick?’
‘We’ll have to do something before Joyce comes out again.’
‘Oh God. We’re in enough trouble as it is.’
‘But why are you called Rogue Lion Safaris?’ Helen asked.
‘We are called Lion Safaris,’ George said, rather primly.
‘The people at Mukango Lodge called you Rogue Lion Safaris. So did that nice boy who looked after me while I was waiting for you to turn up at the airport.’
‘Bloody Lloyd the Stringer,’ I said, or rather muttered beneath my breath.
‘I really can’t apologise enough for being so late that day,’ George said. He didn’t explain that we had found a leopard on the way, and had watched it for half an hour while it stalked fruitlessly about in the unconcealing daylight, after what had plainly been an empty night of hunting. ‘But, no, I think people like Lloyd think that, well … the point is that our operation is –’
‘Not so dull as the others,’ I suggested. ‘Rather more concerned with the bush than with anything else. I bet it was van der Aardvark who wrote on our vehicle, or his eejit assistant, your friend Lloyd. Even money it was them. Better, I’ll take six to four.’
We dropped into the Tondo, a dry riverbed, floored with sand, a wet-season river that flowed, when it flowed, into the mighty Mchindeni River itself. We made our crossing about a hundred yards upstream from this confluence. Ahead, a couple of hundred yards further, we could see the tiny scatter of huts that made up Lion Camp. From any sort of distance, it always appeared absurdly vulnerable and small: no mighty stockade against the perils of the bush, rather, a small hiding place lurking beneath the ebony trees. The few huts, each walled with bamboo matting and wearing a small hat of thatch, looked, from the banks of the Tondo, like abandoned laundry baskets. To one side, no more obtrusive and as deeply stained with the colours of the bush as the huts, the vehicle. Bush-weathered, it seemed as if the camp and the vehicle had all sprung from the floor of South Mchindeni National Park.
Then, coming to meet us at an unprecedented run, was Joseph Ngwei, trainee safari guide. ‘George!’ he shouted. ‘George, why aren’t you at the airport?’
‘Airport?’
‘Well, I am catching a plane today,’ said Helen mildly. ‘Isn’t it this morning?’
‘Oh dear,’ said George, quite unperturbed. ‘I wonder what time it leaves?’
‘I heard van der Aardvark’s vehicle leave more than an hour ago,’ Joseph said, voice filled with urgency. This was a reference to the camp across the river from us, invisible but intermittently audible. ‘That can only mean he is going to the airport himself. So the plane must be leaving at ten.’
It was now close to nine, and the journey normally took a couple of hours. ‘Oh dear,’ said George cheerfully. ‘Well, we’ll probably make it. Possibly anyway. Have to miss breakfast, though, awfully sorry. I suppose we’d better be off pretty soon, really. Have you packed, Helen? I suppose you’d better pack.’
There were times when even George’s most devoted supporters wanted to pick him up and shake him. ‘I already put Helen’s kit on the vehicle,’ Joseph said. ‘Excuse me for taking the liberty, Helen. And Sunday has made some egg and bacon sandwiches for breakfast, they’re on the front seat. So just go, George, yes?’
George gave no sign of appreciating this initiative. ‘All right then. We’d better be off.’
‘I’ll just check my hut,’ Helen said.
‘Have we got anyone to collect?’ George said vaguely. ‘Have you got the bookings book, Joseph?’
‘No one to collect, George, we’re empty.’
‘Are you sure? I’m certain we had a booking.’
‘We did. There was that big Wilderness Express party, but they’re not coming, are they?’
‘Oh God. I’d forgotten that. What on earth possessed Joyce to get rid of them? I wish you hadn’t reminded me. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh well. Better go, I suppose. Helen? Anybody else coming? Joseph, Dan?’
‘I’m coming,’ I said. ‘I might see someone I know.’
‘He means he might get the chance to lust at Mrs van der Aardvark,’ Joseph explained to Helen.
‘Slander,’ I said. ‘Not my type at all, that one. You coming, Joseph?’
‘I’ll stay,’ Joseph said. ‘I have some work to do.’
‘Writing to Gianna,’ I explained to Helen, counter-teasing. ‘Dear Gianna, I send my love from the shower cubicle …’
‘Sex mad, my staff,’ said George. ‘Are you ready, Helen?’
When Helen had taken her place at the front of the vehicle, I climbed on behind. It was the standard vehicle of the Mchindeni Valley, a Toyota Land Cruiser with an open truck bed and a pair of benches fixed in the back, one bench higher than the other: a mobile platform for game viewing. But somehow, it didn’t look like standard transport. It was older than most of the vehicles run by the other camps. The doors of the cab had been removed, against conventional wisdom. Naturally, there was no windscreen. The vehicle looked as if it had done several seasons too many, mainly because it had. It had hit too many trees, had heaved itself through too many thorn bushes, had climbed the walls of too many dry riverbeds. Every square inch of its surface bore testimony to a million passages through all but impenetrable bush.
The company logo had been applied near each of the forward wheel arches: a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion surmounted by the words ‘Lion Safaris’. The word ‘rogue’ had been crudely painted beside this on each side in thick black varnish by an unknown hand. George had painted over this still more crudely in borrowed white emulsion. All in all, it was not a vehicle that inspired confidence in a non-bush-hardened client.
‘Well,’ said George. ‘Either we catch the plane or we don’t.’ He let in the clutch with his customary violence; my hand flew in a long-established reflex to my hat, once a racing trilby but now, like the vehicle, showing signs of hard use in the bush.
George’s driving was impatient at the best of times. On the road, the roads being merely graded tracks, he was a perfectly dreadful bush driver. Off the road (off-road driving naturally forbidden by the Manual), he was reckoned to be even worse. In point of fact, he was superb in this area, but the ride was never less than alarming. Most bush drivers tended to cruise gently, giving the animals the best possible chance of being unamazed. George preferred to roar about the bush, crash-halting when a nice animal came into sight, catapulting the clients out of their seat, desperately clutching cameras and binoculars while exclaiming with delight. This morning, George had a licence to hurry, and he hurried. Bush roads are not designed for speed (‘never exceed 20 kph,’ said the Manual) and the drive was rather like doing the Cresta Run on a tin tray. I stood, preferring to take the bumps through my legs rather than my back, removing my hat and standing on the brim to keep it safe. Impala flew from our roaring progress, puku scuttled away like huge fox-coloured rabbits. A party of zebra watched us amazed from the middle of the road, forcing George to lift his foot for a second. ‘Stupid bloody animals, don’t know what you see in the bloody brainless things, Dan …’
I pointed to one as we swept past and shouted over the engine’s noise: ‘Stallion!’
‘Definitely!’ George shouted back. ‘Bateleur, see, Helen?’ He crammed his foot to the floor again, still staring skywards at the eccentric tailless eagle of the Mchindeni Valley.
Helen craned her head back as we sped away, catching a fleeting glimpse of the gliding bird, and catching my eye as she did so. ‘Do you know what I say?’ she asked me, in a thoroughly unladylike yell.
I bent down. ‘What?’
‘Bugger the bloody plane!’ It was the first time I had heard her use an improper word. Both the word, and the sentiments were, I think, new to her. ‘Yes, bugger the plane. That was the most wonderful morning of my life.’
‘I believe you have fallen in love with Auntie Joyce,’ I said.
She turned to me again, and didn’t speak. Instead, an absolutely colossal grin. Then she asked: ‘Will we make it?’
We hit a bump, and I, in my unbalanced crouch, briefly flew, rescuing my hat with an adroit dab of the foot on touching down again. ‘Even money,’ I said. ‘Better, I’ll take six to four.’
2 (#ulink_fde45c2b-6452-5f97-88d3-168aebad8dc7)
I had never intended to be a safari guide. I was always going to be a racehorse trainer, like my father. I had grown up with racehorses. For twenty years, or since I could walk, I had been, or at least had seen myself as his right-hand man. I had been assistant trainer, mucker-outer, yard-sweeper, groom and work-rider. My father was a widower – I could hardly remember my mother – and he had never remarried. Horses were his life. He was English, but ‘by an Irish sire out of an English dam’, as he always put it. English enough in normal circumstances, he would become progressively more Irish with strong emotion or strong drink. Neither state was unusual; his stage Irishisms were deliberately self-mocking, deliberately endearing: ‘Sweet Jaysis, the focken dry season’s upon us,’ every time a bottle was finished, which was often.
He ran a string of a couple of dozen beasts, a mixed band of jumpers and flat horses. There was never a horse of any great distinction, but he, we, had a winner here and a winner there, ‘and God send nothing worse’. He loved horses, gambling, drink and chasing women, the women making a distant, hard-panting fourth. A big, bonhomous, bibulous man, he was greatly and widely loved, if seldom very profoundly. People tended to feel protective of him; I did myself. He was the most easy-going man in the world: generous and comfortable with clients, employees, women, horses. Perhaps that was why his horses never won quite as often as they might have done: he was a man without ruthlessness. But boundlessly optimistic: and as long as the horses won sometimes he was content.
Legends accumulated around him: he was that sort of man. They centred on his eccentricity and his extraordinary ability with horses. The best of these was the Derby winner he found wandering about on a motorway late at night, having dumped its rider and taken off that morning: how my father, having persuaded the frightened animal to trust him, led it home across country, arriving in the horse’s yard at two in the morning in full evening dress, leading a million pounds’ worth of horse in one hand, an open bottle of champagne in the other, a smouldering cigar in his mouth. In fact, it was not a Derby winner, nor a motorway, and the champagne and cigar were later embellishments. But the story was true, the racehorse was indeed a good one (Falco Spirit, went on to win the Cambridgeshire) and my father was certainly wearing a dinner suit. I know, I was there. I had picked him up after a dinner with one of his owners in Newmarket, and was driving him home. I remember seeing the horse and stopping: and then my father’s calm, matter-of-fact gentleness: ‘All right, me fella, what do you say to a few mints, now?’ Inevitably, he had a packet of Polos in his pocket: you could always tell my father’s movements around the yard by following the minty breath of his horses. Everyone in racing loved the story: well, everyone in racing loved my father. But they never sent him their best horses.
I spent most of my youth being told what a wonderful man he was: he was a genius with horses, a genius with money. How did he manage to run a small business so successfully, and with such style? What was his secret? I didn’t know then, but his secret was that he wasn’t and didn’t. It was something I should have known: and perhaps remedied. But I didn’t.
I finally learned the truth of my father’s business a few days after he died of a heart attack at the races. I took a little comfort in the inevitable witticism that ran through racing at the time: he had dropped dead from the sheer shock of seeing one of his own horses win. This was meant affectionately, on the whole, and I took comfort where I could find it. For I was struck down with grief, which is a kind of madness: a refusal to believe that it was not possible to turn the clock back just a few days: to, say, take over the bookwork, run the business, save the day, romp home a winner. Had I done the bookwork, would he be alive now? I could not bear such a thought, but I kept on thinking it all the same.
To my eternal regret, I was not with him at the races that day. I had been in the middle of my finals at university. I was completing a degree in zoology. My childhood, not lonely but somewhat isolated, had been divided between horses and nature. I had been a bird-watcher, a flower-presser, and a maker of soon dead pets from wild rabbits, hedgehogs and baby birds. I had jars full of beetles and I had watched many moths emerge raggedly from hoarded chrysalises. The first great love of my life was a stoat I had as a pet for a glorious few months, until it escaped. I was an only child in a stableyard set a fair distance from the village: horses, birds and wild beasts peopled my childhood: these, and my affectionate, chaotic father.
I read, of course, incessantly. My early heroes were Mowgli and Dr Dolittle; later heroes were the great interpreters of animal behaviour: Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Cynthia Moss on elephants, George Schaller on pandas and gorillas, George Sorensen and Peter Norrie on lion. My copy of their book, Lions of the Plains, was nightly perused in wonder, till it became a mass of dog-ears and pencillings. I had a few friends from neighbouring yards; my second great love after the stoat was the daughter of a trainer, a kind and lovely girl of much horsiness: very much my type. Perhaps I would have married her, had I not wanted to go to university.
My father had not exactly approved of my ambition to go to university, but he tolerated it well enough. Tolerating things was his strong point. ‘Horses have got four legs, and if you can count to four, you’ve got enough focken zoology for me,’ he had said, but only because he felt it was expected of him. Besides, I was never a student in the traditional sense of the term, having hundreds of affairs, exploring the far reaches of the universe, plotting global revolution. There was a girl in my second year, but she went off to study epiphytes in the Amazonian rain forest. She was, in a different way, very much my type. Things might have turned out otherwise, but probably not. I was still very much involved with racing and horses. I just did my course work and left for the yard. I would arrive at my provincial university at around noon on Mondays, still smelling of horses after riding out two lots. I would stay in residence until Friday lunch time, and get back to the yard in time for evening stables. I knew very few people outside my tutorial group. University was not a formative experience, it was a sideshow. My real life was bound up with horses: with my father’s horses, our horses. I had never considered the possibility of life without him, or them. And so, at his death, I found myself in free fall, plummeting under the gravity of grief.
My first coherent thought about the future, after I had been summoned from the exams by bad news, was that I would simply take over the running of the yard rather sooner than I had expected. Surely, I thought, it was just a matter of picking up the bookwork; I knew the horse side of things backwards. Without ever thinking the matter out at all clearly, I had envisaged taking an increasingly dominant role at the yard, my father gracefully assuming a back seat. It would be a painless transition, a gradual shift in the emphasis of a partnership that had already worked well for twenty years and more. But like lappet-faced vultures, troubles came down to roost.
I had never bothered much with the business side of stable management. Nor, I soon learned, had my father. There were debts: debts to inspire horror and despair. The yard was so heavily mortgaged it was effectively valueless. Repossession was inevitable. The six horses he – we – I – actually owned had not in fact been paid for. They had to go back. We owed the feed merchant, the farrier, the vet, we owed Weatherbys, we owed several jockeys. We even owed for a couple of horses that we no longer possessed. The wine merchant had not been paid either. This was not a mess, this was disaster. My entire legacy was debt. Solicitors wrote to me in scores, their offices telephoned me hourly. My father’s, our, my solicitor would not let me touch a penny of the estate, such as it was. Practically everyone in racing had a prior claim on it. Including the solicitor himself, as it happened.
Clearing up was, inevitably, a grim business. The owners took their horses away one by one, all with kind words and regrets, none more so than Cynthia, the tearful owner of Darlin’ Girl, who had been a faithful owner and, off and on, a faithful mistress to my intermittently faithful father. The lads were paid off: some grousing, some in tears. I organised a funeral, distractedly: my father had been a sentimental, non-practising Catholic, barring annual drunken forays to midnight mass. The undertaker kept ringing me up to ask unanswerable questions, like how should my father be prepared? What were his favourite hymns? I remembered his drunken improvised hymn of victory one afternoon about a year before, accompanied by a mad jig round the yard with two Tesco bags brimming with tenners. It went something like ‘We’ve stuffed the focken bookie and he’s lost his focken balls’, but perhaps that wouldn’t do. Any bloody hymn. ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ is very popular at these occasions, sir. What? Oh yes, the one about the quiet waters by? Yes, sir. Excellent, jolly good. Though neither water nor quiet had ever played a big part in his life. And what should he wear, sir? Plain wooden overcoat, cheapest in the shop. Very good, sir. And what shall I do with his effects? His what? Burn the bloody things. I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir. Will you take delivery of them? All right, all right.
And so I had to sign for this miserable bundle of junk. A large rumpled suit in Prince of Wales check, mud round the turn-ups and a red wine stain over the breast pocket. Brown brogues that needed mending. In the suit pockets keys, Polos. A wallet containing the usual odds and ends. A pair of unusually good race-glasses. A brown racing trilby. My legacy. The rest of the estate was being fought over by my father’s creditors and their solicitors: carrion feeders, hyenas and lappet-faced vultures.
I picked up the wallet: a familiar enough object, enormous, but seldom full, save after the occasional thundering coup against the bookmakers, when wallet, pockets and sometimes carrier bags would overflow with tenners. The wallet contained little of note. I took out the credit cards, and dutifully snipped them in half. There were two twenty-pound notes; these I pocketed, wondering if this was a crime and deciding that it almost certainly was. And there was also an inordinately thick wodge of betting tickets, fat as a pack of cards. I smiled with troubled affection: it was rare for my father to be in possession of entire betting tickets. They were generally ripped asunder and scattered to the four winds as the horses thundered past the post.
And then my heart performed a crash-halt. After a long moment, it restarted: galloping a finish, tumultuous rhythm. In the last race my father had bet on, his horse had won.
A week later I was richer by several thousand pounds. I did not tell any of the solicitors. My father had bet cunningly and well, placing a great deal of money with a wide selection of bookmakers. He had bet at odds from thirty-three to one down to fives. This was, I had no doubt, intended as a desperate coup to save the yard from extinction. Alas, victory had not been enough: the yard and he were gone. But I collected the money on his behalf. All the bookies paid up. There was no legal obligation for them to do so, but they did, some with good humour, some with resignation. One or two were reluctant, but I browbeat them with threats of the dreadful publicity that would follow any meanness. Popular Trainer’s Son Left Destitute by Heartless Bookie. Popularity: that was the trump card. Everyone had liked my father; many would be furious if he was cheated, as it were, beyond the grave. One of the Great Characters of Racing, said the obituaries, and the bookies, sensitive flowers when it comes to bad publicity, decided it was better to cough. And they coughed and they coughed. For the last time in that house, pockets and carrier bags overflowed with my father’s tenners.
In the final analysis, then, my legacy was this: one pair of binoculars from Leitz of Germany; one racing trilby from Bates of Jermyn Street; and vast wads of tenners. Make a life from that. All right, I will. The madness of grief is much like the madness of love, and so madly I rose to the challenge offered by this legacy. I had no close relatives, no close friends, nowhere to go. I had to vacate the house within six weeks. The logical course was to find a job as assistant trainer somewhere; and it wouldn’t have been hard. But I couldn’t face the idea. I was used to our yard, our system, our horses: my horses. I worked with my father, the idea of working for someone was impossible to contemplate. Just about everything was impossible to contemplate. And so, distracted by grief and overcome with bewilderment, I coldly and deliberately permitted myself a season of insanity. It was intended to be no more than that: a season of madness to be followed by a return to my sort of life, my type of people.
After the funeral, massively attended, and the boozy party paid for by my father’s last wager, I returned to the university. A mixture of compassion and respectable work over three years had secured me a respectable degree. They had no objection to my doing an MSc, once I had told them I could pay my own way. It would be research-based. Subjects for this were discussed, methods suggested, many useful contacts were provided. I spent money on telexes and telephones. Within a fortnight it was all fixed. I was going to turn myself for a season into one of the heroes of my childhood.
I flew on a single ticket to Cape Town, and there I bought a beaten-up but still effective Land-Rover. It was a Series One, a model much treasured by Land-Rover enthusiasts. The metal shelf can be used for opening beer bottles; the headlights are placed close together, giving the vehicle a slightly cross-eyed look. Subsequent models had the headlights conventionally placed: ‘No good,’ George was to say later. ‘Can’t hit trees.’ I drove north into Zimbabwe, and there I took up residence in a centre for field research in one of the national parks. I stayed there for just under a year, living in a bunk in a sort of long house for field scientists. I did not abandon horses, not exactly: in fact, for the first time, the two halves of my childhood were in unity. I produced a fat thesis on the subject of friendship in zebras. I did not dare to call it ‘friendship’, of course: in ethology, which is the study of animal behaviour, anthropomorphism is considered the sin of witchcraft. My paper was entitled A Record of the Interactions and Associations between Non-related Animals in Three Breeding Groups of Equus Burchelli Plains Zebra.
I collected enormous quantities of information: how long unrelated females stayed in each other’s company, and what they did together. I noted a thousand nuances of horsy behaviour, and, deep in Africa, I felt profoundly at home. For each gesture, each shared behaviour, was something I had witnessed at home, when my father and I had turned the mares out into the big field ‘for a buck and a kick and a pick of focken grass’. I made hundreds of graphs and pie charts and bar charts. It was all rather like making up an owner’s bill. Don’t give them a focken great big figure and let them boggle at it: give them lots of small amounts instead. God dwells in the details.
I was given enormous help by Dr Jessica Salmon, who was doing a colossal piece of research for one of the international wildlife organisations. She had done her doctorate at my university, hence the contact, and she was now researching every imaginable aspect of zebra ecology. Her project, lavishly funded, had involved the blood-typing of a large number of animals; thanks to her, the non-kinship of my chosen zebras was an established fact. Her groundwork gave my research its validity. She was planning a popular book to follow her research: ‘I want to do for zebras what George Sorensen and Peter Norrie did for lion all those years ago,’ she said. I was delighted that she used some of my own observations in her final, massively authoritative work, all properly, generously acknowledged, and a grand piece of work it turned out to be as well. But that is by the way.
My own paper was finished after a year or so, and so was my money. I got the work typed up in Harare, and posted it – two copies under separate cover, naturally – back to England. I had always thought that I would then post myself, but I did no such thing. I resolved to try my luck, to try ‘one more year’ in Africa.
I met someone who had worked in tourism, in South Mchindeni National Park, further north. He had worked as a safari guide for Philip Pocock. I was suitably impressed: Pocock was something of an African Legend, a former white hunter who had turned rabid conservationist and grand old man. I was given a letter of introduction and recommended to give it a try. Still uncertain of why, I drove on.
I reached the Mchindeni Valley a couple of weeks before the dry season, also known as the tourist season, or sometimes just as The Season, officially began. The camp operators were setting up for six months of beasts and tourists. I found my way to Mukango Lodge: this was the first tourist operation that had been established in the Valley. Pocock still ran it. I sought him out, and dealt him my letter of introduction. This seemed to go all right. He gave me a beer, talked about zebras and the research centre. He was not hiring staff himself, but I had timed this visit well: it turned out that he was holding a party that night for all the tourist operators in the Valley, a traditional pre-season ritual. I was invited to the do, and offered a bed for a few nights, until I had found a job. Philip Pocock was a crusty and difficult man, but always very kind to me.
The gathering that evening was large, and somewhat overwhelming. I knocked back several beers as a defensive measure, erected my academic status as a wall. I had expected the gathering to be all male, but there was a fair number of women as well. Most camps, I learned, employed a European woman as caterer; after a year on a research centre, each one seemed a dazzling nymph. Most of the people were white, but there was a small number of Africans among them. One of these, who worked as a safari guide with Philip, discoursed learnedly with me on zebras. I met a short but terribly wide man with a penetrating Afrikaner accent, who talked solid business at me. ‘The logistics of running a business on a six-month operation are frightening, man. You’ve got to be good to survive out here, man.’ I met an intense English birding type called Lloyd, who confused me mightily with his talk about red-billed and Cape and Hottentot teal. He told me more than once that he had seen a palmnut vulture that day. ‘A crippler,’ he said. ‘An absolute bloody crippler.’ I was familiar enough with birding slang to follow him. He introduced me to his camp’s caterer, whose beauty caused me to freeze instantly, like an alarmed impala. However, she treated me with impenetrable English snootiness, and when she heard I was looking for a job, she looked me up and down, and laughed. I decided that I hated her. Her freckled, sun-bleached appearance had rendered me more or less incapable of speech, but more attractive still was the thought of throwing her into the Mchindeni River to take her chances among the hippo. Not my type at all: she looked like the sort of owner who every week announced she would take her bloody horse elsewhere. Focken take him. He’ll not win nothing without a rocket up his arse.
I moved on, finding myself in conversation with a clownish individual in baggy shorts: shorts, I couldn’t help noticing, that had a kind of open-work crochet pattern around the crotch, a pattern created, presumably, by tumbling shards of cigarette. He looked like the party bore, and my first thought was to wonder how to escape. He was lanky without being in the least bit tall; he had a haircut of grey stubble that appeared self-administered, or rather, self-inflicted. I was struck by the almost cosmic filthiness of his clothes. He seemed utterly out of place in this pleasant, civilised gathering. He asked, in an unexpectedly mellow tone, what I had been doing.
I told him, in a rather superior fashion, about friendship in zebras, for I was a field scientist, no mere safari guide. ‘How terribly interesting, I’ve always wondered about doing another study, perhaps of a herbivore, though I’d never thought about zebras, confusing things, after my stuff with, well, those lion, you know.’ For this, of course, was George Sorensen, the George Sorensen, African legend, co-author of Lions of the Plains. I was instantly ashamed, instantly impressed. I noticed that his glasses had been fixed across the bridge with Elastoplast. (In fact, I was to notice that George changed this bridge far more often than any other of his garments, Elastoplast replaced by Sellotape, replaced by masking tape.)
I also had the weird impression that the cigarette he was smoking was made from newspaper. This turned out to be the case. ‘The Guardian Weekly,’ he explained. ‘Airmail edition. Best for cigarettes. May I roll you one?’ I accepted. The tobacco, thick, coarse and crackly, delivered a powerful and pungent smoke. We discussed the usual problems of field work, and he asked with great attention about my zebras. The key to ethology is the recognising of individuals: no, I had not used coloured ear-tags, or anything of the kind. ‘Well, I have read that every zebra has a distinct stripe pattern, of course,’ George said. ‘But then I have also read that every snowflake is unique. It has always seemed an impossible business to me.’
‘It’s just a matter of getting your eye in,’ I said. ‘Same with all animals. A racehorse trainer can recognise every horse in his string. Zebras are easy – easier than lion, I would have thought.’
‘I’ve always found zebras exasperating. I can’t even tell males from females half the time, not without a long hard look.’
‘Well, I will take a bet that I can tell the dominant stallion from any breeding herd of zebra within, say, five seconds of seeing the herd, and I’d be right seven times out of ten. I’d bet better than even money. These cigarettes are good.’
‘Aren’t they? I get the tobacco in the village just down the road from here. How can you pick out the stallion so fast? Without peering at the undercarriage for half an hour?’
‘Body language. And the position he takes up relative to the herd. And especially the way the herd responds to him. Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s amazingly straightforward.’
‘How terribly terribly interesting,’ George said, without a shred of irony. ‘Do you think you could show me? Perhaps we could take a drive tomorrow? I assume you’re staying here. I could pick you up after breakfast.’
‘Why not?’ I wonder now how many hundred times I have asked this same non-question of George. Why not, indeed.
3 (#ulink_a04a5d88-194f-5dc0-90dd-ac0dcc68bf7d)
I suppose it does sound rather melodramatic, but all the same I don’t suppose I ever will forget the sight or vision that greeted us as George, Helen and I turned into Mchindeni Airport. George, eschewing the tarred road, had taken an intriguing and bouncing short cut across open country – ‘I think a spot of bundu-bashing is in order’ – crunching and pitching through the scrub. Negligently wiping out a small bush, he jumped the vehicle heroically back onto the road, pounding up to the front of the airport building, eyes skyward as he remarked, ‘Wire-tailed swallows’ above the engine’s roar, and made, passengers listing crazily forward, his trademark crash-halt.
There, watching every yard of our arrival, was the sight or vision, and it affected my pulse rate as dramatically as the morning’s lion. This was Mrs van der Aardvark, no less, or to be formal, Caroline Sandford, caterer and deputy manager of Impala Lodge, mistress to Leon Schuyler, who, behind his extremely wide back, was nicknamed van der Aardvark. He was the owner and manager of Impala Lodge, the grandiosely named camp that lay across the river from our own.
She was dressed in khaki shorts and a singlet in umbrella-thorn green and gave an impression of arachnoid limbs. Her straggle of leucistic hair was worn in a style that looked self-administered or self-inflicted, perhaps with wire-cutters. Arms, shoulders, neck, face, legs: all copiously freckled: endless constellations, galaxies and nebulae of freckles, freckles that caused me to wonder, but not for the first time, with the curiosity that is at the base of the erotic impulse, exactly how far, and in what form, those freckles extended.
She was laughing as we pulled up, absolutely roaring with laughter. She was also apparently talking, which was not unusual, but inaudibly. George switched off the engine, and it was as if her personal volume had been switched on. ‘It’s like the clown’s car arriving at the circus, I keep expecting it to explode and all four wheels to fall off. Really, George, where did you learn to drive?’ She turned to me as I stood on the back replacing my hat, and she smiled, something that always had on me the approximate effect of swallowing a large Jack Daniels in one go, ice cubes and all. ‘And you with your trilby and George with his broken specs and, really, Leon and I are labouring night and day to drag this park up-market, and here come the pair of you standing for everything we try not to do.’ She was beautiful and I adored her, but I didn’t like anything she said or did.
I jumped neatly to the ground and observed, ‘There is a difference between money and class, but not everyone knows that. Has the bloody plane gone yet?’
She smiled patronisingly: Impala Lodge would never get into such a mess about planes, oh dear me, no. ‘It’s only just landed,’ she said. ‘They’re running about an hour late.’
‘There you are, you see,’ George said smugly, as if he had personally arranged all this.
‘I’ll get Helen checked in.’
‘What a shame,’ Helen said. ‘I was beginning to like the idea of being marooned.’
‘Marooned with this pair of lunatics?’ Caroline asked her. Truly an insufferable woman. But she seemed completely unaware of either of the two effects she had on me: hopeless desire and helpless anger.
‘I wouldn’t wish to stay anywhere else in the world, given a choice,’ said Helen, suddenly and rather magnificently reverting to her tea-party manners. ‘Let alone in Mchindeni Park.’
I pointed a finger at Caroline’s freckled nose. ‘Class,’ I said. ‘You see, there are some clients you can’t poach from us, and that’s the classy ones.’ Then I seized Helen’s baggage from the back, and George and I escorted Helen herself into the airport building, a long, low hall thronged with tourists and safari guides from all over the Valley.
The meeting of planes was also a meeting of the clans. The dozen or so camps in the Valley were widely separated, relative solitude being rather the point of visiting a wilderness. Everyone knew everyone else at the other camps, but we tended only to meet when collecting or despatching clients. An airport run was always an opportunity to talk shop, swap gossip, lust at caterers and so on.
We steered Helen through various groups of already-checked-in tourists clutching boarding passes and phony items of African fetish, and a couple of hunter types looking sneeringly superior. At the head of the queue, actually checking in, we found Leon Schuyler: van der Aardvark himself. ‘Ullo, George, killed any clients this week?’ He accepted his boarding pass, yielding the check-in to Helen, and turned to us: a chunky, much moustached man, extravagantly epauletted and wearing at his belt a knife that reached almost to his knees. As his nickname suggested, or shouted, he was of Afrikaner extraction, but he had been born in Chipembere, the capital city. He had lived in Africa all his life, educated at school and university in South Africa, returning to the land of his birth to set himself up in the safari business. He was, in a distinctly African way, a great problem-solver: a man of practicalities. He was also said to be very good indeed in the bush and was much respected in the Mchindeni Valley. ‘Leon will know how to do that,’ people said, and he generally did.
‘Oh, not many,’ said George. ‘None to speak of, really.’
‘Is it?’ said Leon, one of the great Afrikaner question tags.
After a brief pause, George remembered his manners. ‘Business all right with you and so on?’
‘Terrific,’ said Leon, or rather, ‘Triffic. Got permission from the National Parks Commission to expand. I am seriously bloody pleased, I tell you. Going to build six more huts.’ Leon’s voice was not Pretoria-pure, but he separated his vowels and suppressed his aspirates in a wonderfully imitable – I imitated it all the time – Afrikaner fashion. Six maw uts.
‘Are you full right now?’
‘Wouldn’t be catching a plane if we were full, man. No, we have two days without clients, quite a relief, I tell you, it’s been non-stop. Going to Chip to talk a bit of business, couple of big meetings and so forth. Plenty clients coming Thursday, plenty-plenty clients. Party of bloody ten, bunch of people in England you’ve probably never heard of. Called Wilderness Express.’
After a slightly stunned silence, I managed to say amiably enough, ‘Bit of a squeeze on game drives.’
‘Nott!’ said Leon, another great Afrikanerism. ‘Bought a new Land Cruiser. Came in from Jo’burg three weeks back, just cleared customs this week, slow bastards. My partner had to move in and kick plenty arse, get the damn thing free. But tell me, George, what is happening with the Tondo Pride?’
Leon, I knew, had little time for George as a businessman; I suspect that even my poor father could have given him a few tips in that area. But Leon knew that when it came to wildlife, and especially when it came to lion, George was the man to ask. ‘George will know,’ people in the Valley said when a conversation about lion reached impasse, and George generally did. And lion were also business: if you showed your clients lion, they tended to go home happy.
‘They knocked down an old buff this morning,’ George said. He gave the location precisely. ‘I fancy that they will stay on the riverine strip now until it rains. I know it’s early, but the drought conditions have altered things. Game concentrations are higher round the river than I have ever seen this early in the season, and practically all the standing water has gone. I think the pride will stay where they are till the end of the season. The plain after the ebony grove due north of ours is currently their core area. Not that that helps you on the opposite bank.’
‘Well, you’d be surprised at what I have in mind, George. But tell me, have you heard any talk about the bloody road? I need information.’
‘That old story again?’
‘Shit, George, you never hear anything unless it’s a bloody bird. ‘It’s all started again, man: second strike of natural gas out in Western Province, want to build a road straight through the middle of the park to make the journey time to Chip down to six hours, open the area up. People from the Ministry of National Resources spent a day with the old man, Chief Mchindeni, talking about a four-lane highway.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked, not a good question.
‘Jesus, of course I’m bloody sure, and I’m going in to Chip to get even more sure.’
‘That would be the end of the park,’ I said, naïvely stating the obvious. But I was suddenly dismayed: the end of the park, the end of my life in the bush.
Leon shot me a brief look of contempt. ‘It would be the end of my bloody business, man,’ he said, Afrikaner-tough. ‘Bastards don’t bloody care. I’m going to shake a few trees down in Chip, I tell you. These bastards are going to get a fight.’ Git a faart.
At this point, Helen joined us, boarding pass in hand, and Caroline also arrived, having shepherded her clients into the departure ‘lounge’. She placed her elbow on Leon’s shoulder, which immensely solid item was located at a convenient height for her. Leon was built on the principle of the cube, with a khaki baseball cap (marked ‘Impala Lodge’ and bearing a leaping impala logo, nicely made – ‘got ’em done in Jo’burg, man, none of the local rubbish’) perched on the top.
‘I have to go through now, they tell me,’ Helen said. ‘Perfectly dreadful. I feel like running away, coming back to stay with you for ever at Lion Camp. I don’t suppose you’d consider smuggling me back?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Any time.’ I kissed her cheek, not without affection, and said, not without truth, that it had been lovely having her. ‘Oh Helen, do you think you could be awfully kind and not actually mention to Joyce that we nearly missed the plane? She’ll be waiting for you at Chipembere Airport, you’ll be seeing her in an hour.’
She smiled. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘And George. Thank you so much, it really was the most – most wonderful – oh dear –’ and there and then, this stately and self-possessed lady was overcome by a deluge of tears. She seized George in a bear hug, kissed him soundly and fled, sniffing, while George and I said more nice things, wonderful having you, come back any time, Auntie Joyce will miss you.
‘What have you been doing to that poor woman?’ Leon asked.
‘Oh, nothing really,’ George said. ‘Found lion for her this morning, that’s all.’
‘It wasn’t the showing that affected her,’ I said. ‘It was making her walk up and shake hands with them.’
‘Tell you what, let’s get back to them this afternoon in the vehicle,’ George said. ‘We’ll drive right into them. I think that should be possible in this terrain. Worth a try, don’t you think, Dan?’
‘Why not?’
‘Right into them?’ Caroline asked. ‘You don’t do that, do you, Leon?’
‘Listen, sweetie, what George does with lion and what I do with lion are two different things. I try to keep my clients alive. Don’t want them eaten by lion, or dying of bloody heart attacks.’ Art attacks. ‘You want to have a art attack, sweetie, you go driving with George.’
‘Well, you can if you like,’ George said vaguely. ‘Very welcome, any time, come now, come with us this afternoon, we’ve no clients today either, you know.’
To my considerable surprise, Leon pounced avidly on this invitation. ‘What a bloody brilliant idea. Triffic, brilliant. Look, sweetie, why don’t you do that, go and look at George’s lion, find out where he is hiding them. Look round his camp, give me a full run-down of their operation. Have a good time. Look after her nicely, you guys, right, and don’t get her bloody eaten or I’ll come across that river with a bloody gun.’
At this point the airport manager approached us. ‘Mr Schuyler, the plane is leaving now, all the passengers are on board.’
‘Christ, sorry, James, all right, I’m out of here.’ Out of year. He kissed Caroline on the lips, the bastard, said, ‘Goodbye, sweetie, don’t get bloody eaten,’ and was gone.
‘Are you sure this is all right?’ Caroline asked, suddenly a little taken aback by all these arrangements being made on her behalf. ‘It’s a nice idea, but I don’t want Leon to impose me on you, you know what he’s like. If it’s not really convenient just say – I was planning to spend the day doing the books, anyway, so I’m not being left high and dry or anything.’
‘Well, all we’ve really got planned today is a look at the lion,’ George said, ‘once I’ve made a phone call to the office. We’ve got to call in at Mukango on the way to use their phone. Look at lion, have a few beers, perhaps. No clients till tomorrow.’
‘George, aren’t we expecting a parcel today?’
‘Oh, so we are.’
George and I walked over to the place where the luggage from the planes was unloaded. ‘George, they’re up to something,’ I said. ‘Caroline and bloody Leon. I don’t like it.’
George looked benign and mildly surprised. ‘Sorry, Dan, I thought you rather liked her, I wouldn’t have invited her if …’
‘There’s a difference between fancying and liking, George. Not my type. No bloody parcel, of course. Another of Joyce’s cock-ups. Oh, well. Let’s go and take the bitch to the lions.’
We walked back to Caroline. ‘Let’s go to Mukango, then,’ George said.
‘If we’ve got to go to Mukango, we won’t get back till mid-afternoon,’ I said. ‘So maybe we should take the spot and have a little go for leopard as well.’
‘I’d love to see leopard,’ Caroline said.
‘You haven’t seen leopard?’ I was amazed. Leopard were rather a speciality of the Mchindeni Valley.
‘Well, I don’t normally go out with the clients,’ Caroline said. It’s not the way we do things. I tend to be a fixed point at camp, apart from when I go out to get vegetables and so on. There’s not much time for game viewing when you are running a lodge full of demanding international clients. I’d love the chance to get out into the bush, actually.’
‘Come along, then,’ George said. ‘If you can face it, after Leon’s dire warnings.’
‘Rather because of Leon’s dire warnings.’
I turned to her with sudden pleasure. ‘Is there a latent craziness in this apparently sane woman?’ I asked George. Caroline laughed. I thought then that there was a chance of reclaiming her for the human race.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Here’s the plan.’ This was something I quite often said. This was because it was something George never said. ‘We drive to Mukango, both vehicles. George calls the office, talks to Joyce and hears her latest plan for ruining the company. Then we all have a beer. We drive to Lion Camp in two vehicles. Sunday gives us late lunch. Then we drive off and look for lion. Sundowner. Spotlight on, and cruise back looking for leopard. Get back for supper. How does that sound?’
‘Admirable,’ George said. Caroline smiled at me again, but I coped.
We drove in convoy to Mukango, an hour’s journey south. Philip Pocock’s lodge had one of the two telephones in the Valley – the other was at the airport but they kept it for themselves – and other camps were permitted to use it for a fee. Philip often pretended that the telephone was his principal source of income; he ran Mukango from a planter’s chair beneath a colossal leadwood tree in the Mukango garden. Now in his seventies, he had of late, he boasted, learned the art of delegation. His staff were inclined to dispute this.
I went up to the Mukango Bar, an establishment so grand it had a real barman, and asked for three Lion, Lion being the name of the beer of the country, and it came out a good shade of lion colour, if occasionally a touch cloudy. George was preparing his mind, or perhaps not preparing his mind, for his call. Lion Safaris was a partnership between George and a charming, generous man named Bruce Wallace, and the booking and administration were carried out from Bruce’s office in Chipembere. Most generously, Bruce had delegated the day-to-day running of the company to his poisonous ex-mistress. Her name, as it happened, was Joyce.
George drank half his beer and took the other half to the telephone, which was in reception a few paces away. Joyce, of course, would already have met Helen at the airport, and helped her to make her connection to Palmyra: the standard tourist trip to the country involved a visit to South Mchindeni for the game viewing and then to Palmyra Resort to wind down.
George got through surprisingly quickly, but the line, judging from his bellow, seemed a poor one. And, all too audibly, it was clear that George was in receipt of a royal bollocking. ‘No, she liked it … Joyce, she may well have been frightened, but … Joyce, she said it was the most marvellous day of her life. No, she was not in any danger. She enjoyed it, I promise you. Ah, Heuglin’s. What? Oh, sorry, no, a Heuglin’s robin has just started singing. No, I know. Sorry. It’s just singing. No, of course not, Joyce, it was a great success. Joyce, I’m sure she didn’t tell you that she had a terrible time. She said she wanted to come back. Well, next time, don’t apologise on my behalf. Oh Joyce, remember Wilderness Express? They’re going to stay at Impala Lodge. That was seventy bed-nights you turned down. Oh, all right then, sixty-three. We can’t afford those mistakes, Joyce. It was a mistake. No, I tell you it was. Oh, never mind. Oh, yes, I knew there was something I wanted to ask you, what about that parcel you promised? There was nothing on the plane. Can you get it to us tomorrow? Why not? Look, Joyce, I know cheese is expensive, but so is meat, and this couple coming tomorrow are vegetarians. Oh, not coming tomorrow? Oh God. Not another cancellation, I can’t bear it. Joyce, this is ruination. Oh, I see. They’ve cancelled one night and are coming the day after tomorrow. So we’re empty two nights now, oh dear. But we still need the cheese. For Christ’s sake, Joyce, I know cheese is expensive, but we’ll save money on meat. Do you want to starve them or something? Sorry, Joyce, I know you don’t. How should I know why they’re vegetarian? Shall I send them to another camp where they’ll get properly fed then? Joyce, this doesn’t make sense.’
Caroline was listening unashamedly, and to George, not the Heuglin’s robin singing strenuously in the shrubbery. More gossip of Rogue Lion Safaris would be spinning round the Valley. Bitch. Bitches both of them. I listened myself, hearing doom in every word George spoke. I had a terrible fear that, one day, Joyce would take the bush away from me. But what could I do?
Philip entered the bar, chuckling to himself. He looked smaller than ever, tortoise neck protruding from the collar of a beautifully pressed khaki shirt. ‘Hullo. Is George having problems,’ he stated rather than asked.
‘George always has problems with that insane woman in Chipembere. And so does everybody else. He’s calling the office, you see.’
‘Oh, I guessed that. Tying George down, it won’t do. George is a free spirit, you do know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said, mildly nettled. ‘I work with him.’
‘Not you, this charming – er –’
‘Caroline.’
‘Yes, of course, and you do realise that George is a great man, don’t you? George is bush, you see, pure bush.’
‘I see,’ Caroline said. ‘And you approve of that, do you?’
To my surprise, instead of getting cross, Philip laughed his wheezy old man’s laugh. ‘I was pure bush myself, once,’ he said. ‘Then I started being a sort of politician, when we needed to get the park established all those years ago. And then I became an old man running a tourist business. But I was pure bush first. And last too, I think.’
‘I see,’ said Caroline.
‘Yes, maybe you do, and maybe you don’t. Humour the old bugger, eh? What do you think of life out here, now you’ve been in the Valley for – what? – four months?’
‘It’s been wonderful. I love it. I never want to leave. Can’t imagine any other way of living.’
Philip began laughing again at this, and followed with a bout of coughing. ‘I’m so sorry, er, Caroline, but your words have a dreadful ring to them. I have known three ladies, each one as lovely as yourself, who said the same thing to me. I can’t imagine any other way to live. I never want to leave. And I married them, all three of them, consecutively, not simultaneously. And do you know what else they said? After a while, they all said the same thing. It’s me or the bush, Philip. Face facts: me or the bush. And so I faced them; the facts, that is. And I always said the same thing, or maybe I just thought it: awfully sorry, old girl, but that is not really a fair contest, is it? And so I have a wife in Cape Town, a wife in Chipembere, and a wife in Wiltshire. And I’m still here.’
‘Is there a moral in this story?’ Caroline asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Philip said. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps the moral is that you’ve always been faithful to your true love.’
Philip stared at her for a moment in some surprise; he had not expected acuteness. Nor, it must be said, had I.
George came back, running his hand through the growing-out stubble of his haircut, making himself look rather like a crested barbet. He and Philip exchanged greetings. ‘And is all well back in Chipembere, George?’
‘Oh, well enough. But I just feel I’m getting a bit old for all this. I spend my life worrying about cheese.’
‘Oh no, you’re not, George. You’re just the same; it’s the park that’s grown older. It’s older and softer and easier, and it doesn’t suit you any more. It’s not what it was when you first came here, let alone what it was like when I came here, all but fifty years back, and started killing all those poor animals. The park has become a success, and that is not what you are made for, George.’
‘Success?’ George asked disbelievingly. ‘We’re going broke.’
‘I’m talking about the park, not about your or anyone else’s business operation. The pioneering has been done, it’s time now for the second-phase people to try and make sure that the work of the pioneers doesn’t get wasted. But you’re a pioneer; you shouldn’t be here any more.’
‘Thanks, Philip.’
‘George, I’ll tell you what you should do.’
‘Do, Philip, do.’
‘Go north. Go to the North Park. Open it up for tourists. Bring in the first wave. It’s a matter of starting all over again up there, no roads, no camps, no tourists. Just the bush. The South Park is too soft for you. Go north.’
‘Why don’t you go?’ I asked. This was a bit cheeky, from someone like me to a person of Philip’s eminence, but I thought on the whole that he deserved to be asked.
‘Too old. Too stiff to live in a tent, too tired to go where there are no roads. If I were twenty years younger, I’d go. Goodness, I’d go like a shot, because the North Park is now what the South Park was when I first came here. But I’m not. Young, that is. The South Park has kept pace with me. We’ve grown old together, old and soft. But you’re young, George; it’s what you should be doing.’
‘I don’t feel young,’ George said, feelingly.
‘Have a beer then,’ I suggested.
‘A good idea. Not totally devoid of initiative, are they, George, the young buggers? Are you training him well? Or does he still confuse the barking of heron and bushbuck?’
This was a reference to a brick I had dropped during my safari guide exam, the examiner being Philip Pocock. In fairness to myself, I must add that it was the only real error: I had passed with an A grade. Philip had given me a tough time during the exam; his principal technique for unnerving a candidate was to respond to a piece of proffered information with the single word ‘Elaborate’. But I had elaborated in a most elaborate fashion, and if my botany had been a little shaky, my large mammal stuff had been easily enough to carry the day.
So now I merely gave Philip the brief version of my normally elaborate impersonation of the call of the wood owl, and stood up to wave to the barman, indicating that four more Lion would be in order.
‘And what is it you are doing with Lion Safaris, Caroline? I know – they are abducting you from Leon and making you work for them as the caterer they so badly need.’ Philip glanced at George with amiable malice.
‘Yes, that’s something I’ve often wondered, George,’ Caroline said. ‘Why don’t you have a caterer? You must be the only camp in the Valley without one.’
‘Oh.’ George gave himself a vigorous scalp massage, changing the style from crested barbet to hoopoe. ‘It was a row I had at the start of the season with the office.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the phone, meaning Joyce. ‘They wouldn’t let me employ a caterer, after I had taken on Dan as well as Joseph Ngwei. Said I had too many staff.’
‘How do you work it out, then?’
‘By sort of committee. Me, Dan and Joseph, and Sunday the cook. He’s done rather well, actually.’
‘So well you will surely pay me a double bone-arse,’ I said, in Sunday’s voice.
‘He’ll be furious about the bloody cheese,’ George said. ‘I daren’t tell him.’
‘I’ll get Joseph to do it,’ I said. ‘He’ll take it better from him.’
‘Excellent.’
‘Oh, you should join these people, Caroline,’ Philip said delightedly. ‘Look at the mess they are making of it all. Join them and sort them out. You’re just the person they’ve been looking for.’
‘I should bloody well think not,’ said Caroline, sitting up straight, all her primness returning. ‘I hardly think a business diploma, not to mention cordon bleu cooking qualifications, is the sort of thing they need.’
‘Exactly what we need,’ I said, with great heartiness. ‘Start this afternoon. No, you’re our guest this afternoon. Start tonight after supper. From nine o’clock tonight you must do everything I want, all right?’
‘No chance,’ she said. No teasing required today, clearly. Sod you then. How were we going to get through the day without coming to blows? ‘I am assistant manager of a properly run tourist operation that offers a luxury safari to top-drawer international clients. And that’s how I intend things to remain.’
‘We just show our people the bush,’ I said. ‘Food is not cordon bleu, but we offer the best lion in the Valley. Lion is the principal item on our menu.’
‘That’s why you get the sort of clients you get, and we get the sort of clients we get.’
Philip was laughing at this exchange. ‘That will suffice, children, thank you. Ah, George, I used to put lion before the comfort of my clients once, but not any more. I am old, and my clients are too fat. It seems that this is the way clients want it to be: a taste of wilderness, and a lot of food and drink and lying around, and then off to Palmyra Resort for a rest, that is to say, lying around eating and drinking. That is the way it must be. So if you are not joining Lion Safaris, Caroline, what is this visit all about? A spying mission, no doubt. See what your deadly rivals across the river are getting up to.’
Caroline stiffened. ‘They have very kindly offered to show me some lion, since we haven’t got any clients in camp tonight. For once.’
‘Oh, a visit to the Tondo Pride,’ Philip said. ‘That should be part of every bush person’s experience. To visit the Tondo Pride with George. Are they well, the Tondo buggers.’
‘Killing left and right,’ George said.
‘Is George really as dangerous with lion as they say?’ Caroline asked.
‘You mean, as dangerous as Leon says,’ said Philip. ‘Oh yes, I should think so. But the thing is, I’ve never felt terribly safe with George. Even when there are no lion around. Even when we’re not in the bush. Not a terribly safe chap, George. You go with him and see the lion. You’ll have the time of your life.’
4 (#ulink_a5fa6c5e-c688-5e1c-b113-76babf1656b6)
From the moment that I joined up with George, I felt as if I were becoming part of an African legend: a minor character in the great legend that was George. Though in fact there were really two legends about him. Among ethologists, and among readers of popular science, he was a ground-breaking genius. But in the Mchindeni Valley he was a dangerous lunatic. His book Lions of the Plains, popular science at its best, had hit me like a shell in my teens. The behaviour of animals, both wild and tame, or half-tamed, had always been the central part of my life; with this book, things acquired a clarity and a purpose they had never before possessed. Hence the zoology degree, hence the study on zebra.
George had produced both the long academic study and the popular work in partnership with Peter Norrie. The academic paper itself was extraordinary; I had wrestled long and hard with it over the course of my studies. Hours of observation, minute cataloguing of detail, and a final analysis in which every insight, every leap of intuition was backed up by a thousand statistics. It was a venerable piece of work, twenty-five years old, and still considered a template for all single-species work. It was a pioneering study, and it paved the way for an ever-proliferating number of similar projects, last and least among them my own.
The people of Mchindeni Valley had difficulty in reconciling the academic legend with everybody’s favourite crazy, with broken specs and open-work crochet crotch. It must be admitted they had a point. The lion study was endlessly meticulous: not George’s most obvious quality. And it was finished: George was a man with a thousand talents, but finishing things was not among them. In the end, I learned that the organising and completing side of things had been Norrie’s contribution, most of the observation and all the insights George’s. Norrie was an academic in shorts; after this joint paper was published he never again left his university. George stayed in the bush, and never published another paper.
Lions of the Plains made money, a respectable amount of the stuff if not a fortune. Norrie had laid his share down as the deposit on a house in Cambridgeshire; George had spent his setting up Lion Safaris with Bruce Wallace. Thus he had exchanged the awed respect of academe for the amiable derision of Mchindeni Valley. ‘George knows,’ people would say, especially when talking of lion, but soon they would be swapping George stories. The vehicle that fell into Kalulu Swamp. The vehicle that George drove off the pontoon and into the Mchindeni River with six clients on board. George’s fall from a tree, his night in the bush unconscious beneath it, covered in blood, his insouciant arrival twenty-four hours later at the Mukango Bar, ordering a beer while still blood-plastered. There were a million stories.
Mine was, and is, about the best. It concerns the first day we spent together: the day after Philip Pocock’s beginning-of-the-season party, when George and I went looking for zebras, so that I could show him how to recognise a stallion within five seconds.
George picked me up at Mukango in the morning and we set off in his terrible beaten-up Land Cruiser. We chose, as a random destination, the distant lagoon where Lloyd had claimed the sighting of his palmnut vulture, and then on, a great loop north to George’s camp. We bounced around the park at a great lick, George slamming on the brakes every time we saw zebra. After five seconds I would call ‘Stallion!’ and point. Then we would clamp our binoculars to our eyes and stare pruriently until we had a firm diagnosis. ‘Yes. Definite male.’
‘Definite male.’
And I was right way above chance expectation, and George asked me again and again about the clues that made instant diagnosis possible, and I rattled on endlessly about my zebras while the African Legend listened with extraordinary humility. It was almost as if I were the venerable, aged-in-the-bush legend, he the young, damp-eared know-nothing. It was certainly as if we were colleagues. A little later I diagnosed not humility but generosity: perhaps the only quality that really matters.
For the rest, we talked endless wildlife shop. George was, I soon learned, a generalist of bewilderingly wide knowledge, but still wider curiosity. We discovered a taste in common for wild speculation. Why not? So often in science, the intuitive leap comes first, the spadework second. George recorded all these pieces of speculation onto his tape recorder, vowing to investigate them further, to seek out evidence. After a long morning of it, we reached the lagoon where the palmnut vulture had, or had not, been seen. We pulled into the shade of a kigelia tree, and scanned about with binoculars. George produced lunch from the inaptly named cool box. We flipped off the tops in the door-latch of the Land Cruiser and drank it.
I found the palmnut vulture too. George fetched his telescope, an instrument which, I was to learn, was forever falling off its tripod without warning, and focused on the bird for a closer inspection. ‘It’s actually a fish eagle, isn’t it? An immature?’ The question was a statement. I took a look myself.
‘I see what you mean. I’m completely wrong.’
‘Well, they do look quite similar.’
‘George, do you know what I think?’
‘That the fish eagle is the bird that Lloyd identified as a palmnut vulture.’
‘I’ll give you –’
‘Better than even money?’
‘Much better. Heavy odds-on. Outrageous stringing.’ I then had to explain to George that ‘stringing’ was birding slang for faulty diagnosis, and so the bogus palmnut made Lloyd a stringer of heroic dimension. Pleased with the thought, we finished our beer, restored the bottles to the ‘cool’ box, and George started up. Or rather he didn’t. He turned the key, but nothing happened. ‘Oh dear, I wish it wouldn’t do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Well, there’s something wrong with the ignition switch. It sometimes turns the heating on by mistake when it’s in the off position. And that drains the battery. And sometimes the wires fall off the battery, too. Perhaps it’s that and not the heating. I’ll have a look.’
He opened the bonnet and discovered that it was, indeed, the detached wire at fault. I passed him, at his request, a wallet of tools from the glove compartment. After a few moments of fiddling, George asked me to try the key again. Success. He slammed down the bonnet, and we drove off again, travelling fairly briskly towards Lion Camp. We stopped a lot on the way, especially for zebra. George was now trying to diagnose the stallions himself and was getting the hang of it fast. But then the vehicle went lame on us. ‘Sod it.’ Puncture: a routine emergency. ‘Give me the wallet of tools again, Dan. I’ll get the jack.’
‘What tools?’
‘The ones you gave me before.’
‘You never gave them back to me.’
‘Of course I bloody did.’
‘You bloody didn’t. Anyway, they’re not here.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Anything vital in there?’
‘Wheel wrench.’
‘Oh, bugger it. Perhaps we can bodge the wheel nuts loose with a shifting spanner. Have you got one?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘It’s with the wallet of tools.’
‘Oh, arseholes, where the hell is the tool kit?’
‘I rather think I left it on the front bumper after I closed the bonnet. After I had fixed the wire back onto the battery. It will have fallen off, probably still under the kigelia tree.’
‘About two hours’ drive away.’
‘About that. Oh well. We’d better walk.’
‘Walk? It’d take two days.’
‘No, no, no, to camp, to my camp, to Lion Camp, you know. It’s only about a mile off, and I’ve plenty of spare tools there.’
It was an iron rule of The Safari Guide Training Manual that when in trouble, you stayed with the vehicle. Walking safaris were, of course, permitted in the Mchindeni National Parks, but only in the company of an armed scout. George and I, unarmed, set off into the bush. ‘You hardly ever see any game around here,’ George said airily.
‘Oh good.’
Within five minutes we had walked almost straight into a lioness. She was lying stretched out beneath a tree, as soundly asleep as only a lion can be. She did not move a muscle. I loved her. We swung away from her, altering course to follow the bank of the dry Tondo River, aiming to cross at its confluence with the Mchindeni. That was enough bad luck for one walk, anyway, I thought.
After five minutes or so, my pulse had slowed a little and I had stopped mouth-breathing. I felt extraordinarily exposed: naked. We reached the high bank of the Mchindeni: three hundred yards away, I could see the framework of a couple of incomplete huts, signs of rather desultory human activity. This was my first sight of Lion Camp.
Our path took us to the confluence, the wide funnelled mouth of a river of sand, its banks studded with thick combretum bushes. It was at this point, about ten yards from the first bush and a hundred yards from camp, that there was a small, localised nuclear explosion. The first bush blew up in front of us; with a great detonation of snarls and a rip and snap of breaking twig, there before us was the biggest lion I had ever seen in my life, dark-maned and colossal, with carthorse-huge feet, an eye-filling sight of teeth and mane and yellow eyes. Afterwards, I felt the experience was rather like the playing of a fruit machine, a subject on which I was an expert: a wait for the flashing symbols to settle on a decision and to spell out your fate. For about one hundredth of a second, the symbols seemed to flash through the yellow eyes – fight or flight, fight or flight, fight or flight – before settling on jackpot. Flight. The lion, surprised and horrified almost as much as us, opted for discretion, and with a sudden flick of the hips, revealing balls like footballs, he turned and covered thirty yards in an instant of time, spinning around on an eminence above us to lash his tail and show us the whiteness of his teeth.
There followed one of those lifetime three-second pauses. And then George said quietly, without turning his head, ‘Definite male.’
After that, of course, there was no escape. That lion did something to me, you see. I was never quite sure what: only that it was irreversible. That night, as we dined at Lion Camp, George invited me to join him as his assistant for the season, and I accepted at once. I took my safari guide exam a fortnight later and the day after that, I was showing our first clients the bush, talking hard on zebra, swotting hard on birds and plants, badgering George to teach me more bird calls. I took up residence in a hut on the banks of the Mchindeni, and every night, I slept to the sound of lion music.
5 (#ulink_6af50769-4c1e-5a8d-9f25-8cc298df5c5a)
Caroline’s first response to Lion Camp almost got her thrown into the Mchindeni River for bisection by hippo. ‘My God, it’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘The things you could do with this place.’ Certainly I flung into the river the thoughts I had been having about reclaiming her for humanity.
It is true that the place didn’t look all that much. You hardly even noticed it; from a couple of hundred yards you might pass by without seeing it. Not a drop of paint in the place, not a square inch of concrete. I liked it like that: above all, it was right. But as I looked at the place through Caroline’s eyes, for an instant I saw a kind of shantytown: a handful of guest huts, walled in weathered and dusty bamboo matting, grass-hatted; staff huts that were little more than lean-tos. The only structure of any solidity was the sitenji: an African term used for a camp’s all-purpose shelter, the eating, drinking, reading, talking, writing area: a nicely thatched roof, more elaborate than the roofs of the huts, supported by stout wooden pillars, with a knee-high wall made from tied-together bundles of dried grass. Inside were a dining table and chairs. Beyond the sitenji, on the edge of the bank, a few ‘comfortable’ canvas chairs were grouped around a small pile of ashes: we had a fire here at night when there were clients in camp.
‘I mean, the potential of this place,’ Caroline said, looking at the elegant grove of ebony trees to the right of and behind the camp, which let through a dappled sunlight. There seemed to be in her eyes something of the same excitement that George and I felt when we saw a crowd of vultures perched high in a tree, and wondered what we might find beneath. ‘Fabulous. Just fabulous.’
‘What would you wish to do with the place?’ asked Joseph Ngwei politely.
‘This could be the hottest camp in the Valley,’ she said, ignoring, or perhaps unaware of, the hostility she was inspiring. ‘I mean, only six guest huts?’
‘Five,’ I said. ‘Ten beds.’
‘But you could double that easily, it’s perfect.’
‘I know it is.’
‘I thought Impala Lodge had the best location in the Valley, but this is better, the views along the river are better, and that wood is unbelievable. You could really do something with this place.’
‘Ebony glade,’ I said.
‘I can’t believe you don’t do more with it.’
‘We thought that improving on perfection was beyond us.’
She turned to me, eyes alight with delight, and said: ‘Come on then. What about a guided tour?’
‘It won’t take long. There isn’t much to see here. Only the bush.’ I showed her the sitenji; this had a bar at one end, at Joyce’s insistence, but no one had ever stood behind it. We used it as a shelf for our natural history books and the spare pairs of binoculars, all intended for the use of clients, and very dusty they got there. Caroline went out to the half-circle of ‘comfortable’ chairs and stood at the fireplace. She remained there for a long while in silence. A great white egret was fishing in the middle of the stream, beside him a spoonbill working furiously in comensal proximity. After a while, she asked: ‘Will you show me the huts?’
The huts were just huts, creaking baskets with light-permeable walls. Each contained two spindly, metal-framed single beds, two mosquito nets, and a small table bearing a Thermos jug of imperfectly chilled water. ‘Where’s the floor?’ Caroline asked.
‘What you are standing on is the floor of the planet earth,’ I said. ‘A light covering of sand from the Mchindeni river bank. What more could anyone want?’
‘Well, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you,’ Caroline said. ‘I can see why you keep hearing rumours about the National Parks Commission wanting to close you down. Who on earth can you get to come and stay here? Why don’t you put concrete down?’
‘It’s not allowed. We’re inside the park here: no permanent structures allowed.’
‘Impala Lodge is inside the park, and Leon got permission to lay down concrete.’
‘I’m aware of that. We don’t actually want concrete, though. We prefer Mchindeni river sand.’
‘What about lavatories?’
‘Oh, we’ve got them, don’t panic.’ I took her to the nearest of the two. ‘Long-drop. Sort of a deep pit, an oil drum at the top. But as you see, a real lavvy seat.’
‘You didn’t think of building them en suite, of course.’
‘Not a good idea. They get to whiff a bit by the end of the season, you see.’
‘Leon got permission to fit flush toilets at Impala Lodge.’
‘Yes, I know, and the water towers are a wonderful landmark for lost travellers.’ The sarcasm washed over her. She seemed to be rather overdoing the casual, professional interest in a competitor’s business. I felt like a house owner listening to a tactless potential buyer criticising the wallpaper and talking loudly about dismantling your favourite room.
Caroline asked: ‘And showers?’
‘Ah yes. Pièce de résistance, the showers. Clients love them. Follow me.’ I led her to the edge of the river bank, where three oil drums stood. Beneath the central one, a small fire of mopane wood was kept perpetually alight; mopane, hard as diamond, forms small coals that glow for hours.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Caroline said. ‘You splash yourselves down out here in the open.’
‘Would we be so coarse and unsophisticated? Come.’ I led her down a short flight of steps, cut into the river bank. At their foot was a small ledge, its outer edge guarded by a bamboo rail. Behind the rail were the two shower cubicles, each the size of a telephone kiosk, roofed with thatch, three walls and a floor cut from living river bank. The fourth wall was air; each cubicle gave a matchless view across the mighty Mchindeni. And from each, you could see both egret and spoonbill, and hear the grunting and guffawing of a pod of hippo in a deep pool a few yards away. Caroline inspected the shower head and the two taps, which were fed by the oil drums above: hot and cold. A straggling party of a dozen foxy-red puku was coming down to drink on the far side of the river; a pied kingfisher flashed before us, halted in mid-air, hovering hard, before plunging twenty feet into the river, emerging triumphantly fishfull.
Caroline placed both her hands on the bamboo rail, and looked out over the river. I said nothing; nor, for once, did she. A sudden piercing whistle, surprisingly close, cut the air, and she jumped. ‘Puku,’ I said softly. ‘Alarm call. Look, there he is, right below us.’
‘Antelope whistle? Is this a tease?’
‘Would I do such a thing? I know it’s an odd noise for an antelope, but it’s what they do.’
Obligingly the puku did it again, and Caroline laughed suddenly. ‘You know, there are moments when I see the point of you lot. The shower is lovely. But doesn’t all this neo-primitivism upset the clients?’
‘Some are a bit taken aback at first,’ I said, answering seriously because this was intended as a serious question. ‘Especially if they’ve been told to expect something different. And that happens more often than we would wish.’
‘But that’s dreadful. Can’t you control the way you are marketed? It’s the first rule of business, surely.’
‘Well, that’s our Joyce for you. But the thing is, once we’ve got the clients – on the rare occasions we get any, that is – it begins to work to our advantage. We tell them this is a camp, a bush camp, the real thing, no half-cocked lodge. This is where the real bush people go. And we give them lots and lots of bush, lots and lots of animals. They mostly get the hang of things. The ones who are nervy at first generally end up the biggest fans. They feel they’ve achieved something, which they have, and they end up really pleased with themselves. That’s great fun for us, when it happens, and it happens a lot.’
‘Yes, I can see how that might be a good strategy,’ Caroline said thoughtfully. ‘If you could market it properly, it would certainly be effective. If you could tap in to the right sort of clients.’ She laughed at herself suddenly. ‘God, if I stay here much longer, I might even start to see the point of George’s insane driving.’
‘You’re a lady very easily swayed.’ I realised that this was a rather risqué remark far too late to call it back.
But Caroline only laughed, and ran up the steps ahead of me.
Sunday coped well with the unexpected guest, producing a quiche from his hole-in-the-ground oven – that too fascinated and appalled Caroline – and putting together a salad. Over the meal, Caroline started to ask how we managed for light. Paraffin. What, no electricity? No generator? Leon had a generator. Yes, we knew that. We knew that very well indeed. We heard it start every evening, and when the wind blew in the right, or the wrong direction, we heard its mutter throughout the evening. We had no wish to impose further din on ourselves, on our clients, on the bush. ‘But how do you keep the animals out?’
‘We don’t.’
‘But don’t you get animals in the camp? I mean, we use the generator to run an electric fence. So the clients can walk about camp in comfort and safety.’
George broke into the conversation suddenly, with his mouth full of quiche. ‘Course we get animals in camp. It’s in the middle of the bloody bush, isn’t it? Where do you think you are, Kew bloody Gardens?’
‘I’m sorry, George,’ Caroline said, quite humbly. ‘I’m not used to the idea of animals in camp. Impala Lodge is sort of a safe area, an island, if you like, surrounded by bush, where the clients feel safe. You look out at the bush from the safety of Impala Lodge, if you see what I mean. You do it differently here, and I’m not used to it.’
‘Out here we’re awash with animals,’ I said. ‘Going for a pee in the middle of the night is one of life’s great adventures.’
‘And the animals really come into camp? What sort of animals?’
‘Elephant the other night,’ said George. ‘Hippo round the edges every night.’
‘Heard leopard this morning,’ I said. ‘Did I say? While I was waiting for you and Helen, right on the edge of the ebony glade.’
‘And bloody honey badger,’ George said.
‘We bear good will to all living creatures at this camp,’ I said. ‘Except honey badger.’
‘What do they do?’ asked Caroline. ‘Steal honey?’
‘They steal bloody everything, and last week they managed to rip open a tin trunk full of food. A tin trunk! They bit it open.’
‘We had lion in the camp last night,’ Joseph said. ‘I found tracks after you had left on the walk.’
He had George’s full attention immediately. ‘Really? How many?’
‘Just one. Female, I think, not a full-grown male, certainly. She passed between your hut and Dan’s, round the back of the sitenji, and then in front of huts four and five.’
George considered this for a moment.
‘But what are you going to do about it?’ Caroline asked, alarmed, and no doubt already considering the adventure of the nocturnal pee.
‘Not sure. I’d like to have followed her,’ George said. ‘But it’ll be too late now, of course. Perhaps she was going to look for our old friend, the alpha male. Because he wasn’t with the rest of the Tondo Pride this morning, was he? Perhaps there’s a honeymoon going on.’
‘But the rest were all there on the buff this morning, George, all twelve of them.’
‘I know. That’s why it’s interesting. She must have come from another pride, probably the one to the south of us. Seeking a spot of exogamy, perhaps.’
‘Exogamy?’ Joseph asked.
‘Copulation outside the pride. Very healthy thing, of course. Refreshes the gene pool.’
Caroline said nothing, but you could see that she badly wanted to. She could not understand how lion, rather than the camp, were George’s priority.
‘I know,’ George said. ‘Perhaps we could do a little detour tomorrow and look for her. On the way to the airport to collect the vegetarians.’
‘They’re not coming tomorrow,’ I reminded him.
‘Nor are they, bugger it. Oh, bugger this bloody season. Bugger everything. Well, never mind. We’ll listen out. Maybe drive out tomorrow if we hear anything in the night.’
‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it. Now, here’s the plan for today. We have coffee. Then we go and see lion on the kill. I’ll pack a cool box for sundowners. Beer, everybody? You coming, Joseph? Lion, Coke?’
‘Sure. Lion.’
‘Caroline, you haven’t got binoculars, have you? A few spare pairs on the bar, the small ones at the end are the best. All right?’
And so, half an hour later, we set off. I must confess to a paltry stratagem. Joseph and I conducted a constant, never admitted competition for the front seat of the vehicle. Travelling up-front with George was always instructive; you could never learn enough. But on this occasion, I ‘forgot’ my hat and went back to fetch it at the last minute, returning to find George and Joseph in the front, Caroline on the back. I swung jauntily into the back alongside, trilby at a dashing angle. Cool in the Bush.
We were delayed on the way to the lion kill by a small group of kudu females, tall, stately and gorgeous, a deep maroon, almost a purple colour, painted with white stripes by a wavering hand. They had ears like satellite dishes, large eyes in faces also picked out with slim white stripes. They stopped motionless at our approach, an utterly characteristic antelope attitude: neither quite trusting nor quite fearful, they gazed unwinking. ‘Oh, the lovely, lovely things,’ Caroline murmured beneath her breath.
‘Surely you’ve seen them before.’
‘Not close. Look at those faces, it’s like the hymn; you know, that line about “looked down with sad and wondering eyes”.’
‘Bateleur,’ said George. ‘Oh, and hear the brubru, sounds just like a telephone.’
‘So it does,’ said Caroline. ‘I’ve never heard that before.’
We drove on. ‘How odd, to start singing hymns in the middle of the bush.’
‘Not so odd. I sing hymns everywhere. My father is a vicar.’
‘Oh,’ I said, rather inadequately. ‘What does he think about you being in the bush?’
‘He thinks I’ll grow out of it.’
‘My mother thought that,’ George called from the front. ‘A lot more vultures.’
He was right. The umbrella thorn above the kill was now thick with them, motionless, like weird and probably poisonous fruit, as they surveyed the banquet from which they were still excluded.
‘All right,’ George said. ‘Ready for a spot of bundu-bashing, Caroline?’ Without reducing speed, he drove off the track and onto the bush-studded plain. This had a drastic effect on the motion of the Land Cruiser: on the road, it rolled like a Channel ferry in mildly inclement weather; the plain imparted a violent pitching and yawing motion that mimicked a sea passage in a typhoon. Caroline, propelled from her seat, made a desperate lunge for the grab-bar. I was already standing high, one foot on the spare wheel and the other on the vehicle’s side, holding onto the grab-bar with one hand. Though it looked fairly cool, this position was not, in fact, for Caroline’s benefit: good bush-driving in these circumstances is a team job. With the height, I could give George useful information.
The way between us and the lion was blocked by the dry watercourse. ‘Left. No, on a bit. Past the bushes. There, you can get down and up here.’ George inched the vehicle down, and then took the rise on the other side with a sudden rush. At the lip, the vehicle twisted giddily, one wheel lost contact with the ground, but after a moment it toppled and fell back with a gratifying thump, and we were across. The way ahead was across a wide area of black cotton soil. This is perfectly horrible stuff. The ground, flooded, dried out and baked, cracks into cobbles. It feels like crossing a sea of cricket balls. You can make walking pace at the easy parts.
‘Is it legal to drive so far off the road?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘Leon says you need a fast escape route when you drive near lion.’
We drove on. ‘The kill’s where it was this morning,’ I called from my crow’s nest. ‘Two, maybe three lion on it. I can see six lying around still under the thorn tree.’
‘Two more under the bush on the right,’ Joseph said.
‘I was just coming to them,’ I said with dignity. I hadn’t seen them at all.
‘Bullshit,’ Joseph said. ‘And a single female there, that makes twelve.’
‘I still can’t see them,’ Caroline said anxiously.
‘Take the nearer of the two thorn trees. Follow the trunk down to the ground. Then left, just a little.’
‘Oh.’
We drove juddering on, pitching and yawing across the merciless ground. George cut away from the line we had walked that morning, coming back to the lion from a more open area. The bushes fell away: we had an uninterrupted view: sandy shapes in sand-coloured grass, a hundred yards away.
George halted for a moment, looking around, and said encouragingly: ‘Perfect. Perfect.’ And then, without any more ado, he drove straight into the middle of them.
He drove furiously on at the not quite walking pace that the conditions demanded, and once comfortably and utterly surrounded by lion, he stopped. And, to an audible gasp from Caroline, switched off the engine.
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